Sometimes cliches do come true

Yesterday, the dog was acting strange all day. Remember reading stories of how the animals all knew that the tsunami was coming in 2004? And I grew up hearing that animals could predict earthquakes, something of great interest to many Angelenos. So when the dog acted weird, it set off alarm bells in my head.

Then the sky turned greenish, the wind picked up, and I truly started to freak the fuck out. I live in a trailer park and all I could think of was, I am NOT going to die in a trailer park courtesy of tornado.* We were under tornado watch until the early morning, which meant a whole lot of waiting. I chose to deal with the fear in a healthy, mature manner: I started throwing cheese down my throat, washing it down with bourbon, and didn't stop until the wee hours of the morning. I figured if I had to spend the next couple of days in a Red Cross shelter, I should at least start off well-fed. And liquored up.

I even left instructions with The Texan as to how I wanted him to take Shrapnel to safety in case I was capacitated in some way. As if The Texan wouldn't take this opportunity to give Shrapnel the freedom he so dearly seeks.**

We managed to avoid the twisters, or to be more accurate, the twisters avoided us. Instead, we got some truly cracking thunderstorms which made me nervous but did not create the type of terror that the threat of a tornado did.

I know this, because I was up until 4:30 AM. I learned that my body does not take kindly to consuming 1000 calories' worth of cheese in one sitting.

* The way I figure it, I'll go one of two ways (KNOCK WOOD): 1) Choking on a piece of beef shiskabob that I greedily took too big of a bite out of. I already did this once at a kabob shop in northern Virginia. Nothing like having a piece of meat wedge itself in your throat to scare the living shit out of you. And to encourage smaller bites in the future. 2) Insouciantly jay-walking. Living in DC taught me to be an agressive pedestrian, which is helpful in some situations but in others, really not so much. Human beings cannot go toe to toe with moving vehicles and expect to come out the victor.

** Shrapnel has taken to making a run for it whenever the front door is open. Usually, nothing comes of it, as the dog has been trained to narc the cat out wherever he's hiding in the yard. But the other day, Shrapnel managed to clear the fence, forcing us to ask the guys at the auto shop next door if they could lure the cat over to us and lob him over the fence. They were very nice and said sure, they'd be happy to help out our pregnant cat. Um, Shrapnel's a HE, and as far as I know, he's not pregnant. He's just bigboned, I say.